When personal data is distributed among a plurality of existing services, there is a possibility of using the personal data among the plurality of existing services to construct a new service providing a new value. For example, a new service allows a user to find a suitable outing spot within a user's usual activity area (position information) with reference to activity history of a friend with the same preference as user's.
To provide such a new service, data owned by an existing service may be passed to the new service. However, the new service and the existing service may be operated by different operating organizations, and a situation may be assumed in which account integration or the like is difficult. Thus, to provide a new service as described above, a method may be adopted in which a link is established among the services and then the data in the existing service is passed to the new service and is provided to users under the new service.
In related art, a technology of establishing a link for user's situation information and sharing information among different social networking systems (SNSs) and a technology of allowing each of a plurality of entities to mutually use resources stored in the respective entities have been suggested.
As related art, for example, Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2009-199368 and Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2003-67326 are disclosed.
To pass data between an existing service and a new service, either one of a user on a data providing side and a user on a data receiving side may create a user account on both services. Also, to pass data between these services, either one of the services may create an interface function in accordance with a counterpart's service interface. Thus, it is difficult to flexibly establish a link among many services.
Moreover, as an existing technique, there is an agent service in which data is shared between accounts. However, since this agent service provides data passing between two accounts used by the same person in two services, it is difficult to apply this technique to information sharing with other person.